Q & A Saturday – Should I Hold an Open House?

Welcome to our Q & A Saturday video.

In these Q & A Videos we will answer your questions about real estate. Any real estate related topic from questions about selling your house, buying a house, real estate investor questions, land lording questions, local market questions and many others things are all fair game.

Today’s question is “Should I Hold an Open House?“

In this video Shaun talks about Pros and Cons of holding an Open House when selling your home.

Some of the main points covered in this video are:

1) What is an Open House.

2) What are some of the drawbacks of holding one.

3) What are some of positives of Open Houses.

4) Why Real Estate Agents like to hold them.

An Open House is an age old tool used to help sell a house. In the past maybe it was a more effective tool but few pros will honestly tell you it is all that useful. The major flaws for this is that many of the people that show up are not even buyers and the ones that are have not been qualified at all, so even if they would like to buy your house they might not have the ability to do so.

Beyond the general ineffectiveness of Open Houses there are concerns of having lots of strangers going through your house and possible theft. Even without anything nefarious happening there is the hassle to making sure the place is clean and put together in a state where you will not mind having people going through the home. While much of this will be true with any showing they will usually have an agent accompanying them and will be less likely to steal but also just going through as many things. Along that same line unlike a private showing you will have many neighbors just being nosy and poking around your place.

So why do many agents still recommend them? They are usually a great way to get some buyer leads. As mentioned above many of the people that are interested in buying a place might not really want or be able to buy yours, but they might be able to buy something and the agent will get their name and contact info and try to convert them to a buyer client. There isn’t anything wrong with this but be aware that the agent is likely to get more benefit than the seller in most situations.

So are there any good reasons to have an Open House. Yes there are still reasons that it can work. The biggest generally will be if you do not want to have lots of showings at many different times. You may limit the buyer pool but if your privacy and routine is paramount then setting aside a few hours on the weekend to have everything happen is not a bad idea. More useful is if you have a place you expect to have a lot of interest you may see it come on the market several days ahead of the Open House and say that there will be no showings prior to it. This can get a lot of interested, qualified, buyers out to it and also give a sense of urgency if the turnout is good. This one situation is where it can be a very useful marketing tool for selling the house.

Hope you enjoyed the video and leave any other questions you have about the topic below or any other topics you would like to see covered in future videos. I encourage anyone that has things they would like to talk about to let me know what they are. You can always fill out a contact us form here and put Q & A in the subject, just leave a comment with your questions below here, send an email to info@masshomesale.com, or post it on our Facebook page or Twitter account.